Case study: How Anders built their services on minimum maintenance

Anders Innovations is one of the largest Python development companies in Finland. We specialize in building a variety of business-critical online solutions and integrations to a wide spectrum of clients from the private and the public sector. Open Source is close to our hearts and we utilize a lot of Open Source frameworks in our work while also contributing back to the community as much as possible.

About Anders

We began evaluating UpCloud by building a small proof-of-concept hosting environment and deployed a few projects to it. Everything worked great, support from UpCloud was fast and the platform performed very well.

After successfully validating the environment, there was no reason to hold back from deploying all of our new projects on UpCloud. Following the success of the new platform, we also decided to migrate our old services onto UpCloud whenever there was a larger update to the hosted service.

Previous challenges

We used to rent dedicated servers from a provider located in Germany. However, that distance caused some difficulty when we would have needed to quickly add capacity or solve problems. Hardware problems can be really challenging to fix when the servers are located in a different country.

When we were considering migrating onto a new provider, we had a few main points we wanted to cover. The server capacity should be provided by a Finnish company. They needed to have availability, besides Finland, in the US and Asia-Pacific areas. The servers had to be easy to manage and priced competitively. UpCloud fit the profile nicely.

Hosting on UpCloud

We use pretty much every feature that can be found from the UpCloud control panel. From server management to firewall control and backup solutions. We have also done some preliminary testing deploying new servers via the API.

For our customer’s needs, we have a fairly standard hosting setup with load balancers, application and database servers. The customer environments are monitored using systems deployed on UpCloud. Furthermore, many of our internal tools (intranet, project management, custom software etc.) are also all hosted on UpCloud.

Improvements

We are happy to have a Finnish company as a partner who is dedicated to continuously improving the platform and providing an A-class service. In addition, consolidating almost everything hosting related to a single provider has been a huge management relief for our system administrators.

The largest difference came from moving off our own hardware onto a cloud service instead. We no longer need to worry about hardware lifetimes, RAID errors or erratic VPN access to console networks. Even while we continue to provide hosting we aim to keep the management side as light as possible and leave the hardware maintenance to the experts.

Future plans

We are seeing a steady increase in our need for server capacity so we expect to be utilizing UpCloud to an even greater extent in the future. Also as already mentioned, we are looking into taking advantage of the UpCloud’s API.

We would like to see more third-party services such as Aiven.io offering their solutions on UpCloud or ready-made options for deploying Kubernetes. In addition, the firewall service could use some love. An ability to handle firewall rules in groups and create rule templates would be appreciated.